CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-19 03:20:24 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

You really have to hear what this guy can do with two chopsticks and a amped-up ukulele.  Hip-hop anyone?

2013-05-19 03:14:50 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Sunset in Vancouver's English Bay

2013-05-18 04:18:14 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-17 14:36:07 (4 comments, 7 reshares, 4 +1s)

*Hungry plant, tiny genome*

The plant Utricularia gibba is, perhaps unfortunately, more commonly known as the humped or floating bladderwort. While that sounds like a name that would get a plant beat-up on the playground, U. gibba is decidedly bad-ass in a few ways. Firstly, it's a carnivore. Carnivorous plants are cool. It eats water insects with the tiny bladders pictured below, and it's quite efficient at it apparently. Secondly, it's classified as a weed in most of the world. "Weed" is actually just shorthand for "well adapted to its environmental niche". That's what we're all striving for and U. gibba seems to be doing a good job of it so far.

Now it has one more quality to add to its coolness: a svelte genome. U. gibba has a respectable 28,500 genes but they're all squished into a genome that is just 82 megabases... more »

2013-05-14 17:44:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Collective Nouns

+Josh Witten at The Finch and Pea has a post with some new collective nouns.  These are always fun to make up so include your favorites in the comments below and I'll highlight the best.  I'll start with two of my own:

A tedium of professors
A band of cytogeneticists 

2013-05-13 05:56:05 (1 comments, 10 reshares, 10 +1s)

xkcd: Birds and Dinosaurs

By any reasonable definition, T. Rex is more closely related to sparrows than to Stegosaurus.

http://xkcd.com/1211/

2013-05-12 15:00:59 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Happy Mother's Day, Moms!  Here's a Galapagos sea lion pup looking for a cuddle from her own Mom.

2013-05-11 15:32:10 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The reason they regularly check their gloves is for damage. Even though multi-layer, even a tiny leak requires immediate haste to airlock.

2013-05-11 06:53:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Science quote of the day.

But what is more, if we have succeeded in adding to the basic understanding of our universe and ourselves, we will have made a contribution to the totality of human culture

Haldan Keffer Hartline

#sciquote  

2013-05-07 23:30:55 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 31 +1s)

Hands up all realists

2013-05-07 14:10:18 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

The History of Typograpy

2013-05-06 20:25:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-05-06 18:35:22 (3 comments, 20 reshares, 34 +1s)

Genetic Analysis

http://xkcd.com/830/

There's still a chance you were conceived via IVF. But we've checked your mom's college yearbook photos, and whether or not she and your father had sex, it's clear that ... listen, I know this is hard for you.

2013-05-06 04:06:34 (19 comments, 1 reshares, 22 +1s)

Bill Nye is basically the best person.

2013-05-05 18:51:21 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Beard-second

The beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light-year, but used for extremely short distances such as those in nuclear physics. The beard-second is defined as the length an average beard grows in one second. Kemp Bennet Kolb defines the distance as exactly 100 angstroms, (i.e. 10 nanometers), as does Nordling and Österman's Physics Handbook. However, Google Calculator supports the beard-second for unit conversions using the value 5 nm, i.e. half the value according to Kolb and Physics Handbook.

2013-05-05 18:42:46 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

[+] Science Sunday Hangout On AIr [+]

"Ferreting out the Truth": Panel Discussion on H5N1 Influenza Virus || Event Page: http://goo.gl/MjFCB 

Later today, +Buddhini Samarasinghe and I are hosting the +ScienceSunday Hangout On Air. This week's topic is on the research being done on the H5N1 Influenza Virus. We'll be discussing not only the research that's been done, but also why there's been so much controversy about it in the news and social media. Is there something we should be concerned about?


Our discussion panel consists of:

+Tommy Leung of University of New England. Tommy is a lecturer and research on parasitology and evolutionary biology. You can find more about Tommy on the web: http://www.une.edu.au/ers/research/eepl/ | http://the-episiarch.deviantart.com/

+William McEwan: Post-doctoralresear... more »

2013-05-05 06:12:13 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

New research proves that America's first colonists were cannibals. Americans could so easily have ended up with the constitutional right to eat people. Crumb my cold, dead hands...My column this week. Love T xo

2013-05-05 00:07:32 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Vancouver's Kits Beach

It's quite a nice day.

2013-05-01 03:46:48 (6 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

+Josh Witten is, of course, entirely correct. There is no greater proof that humans are free from natural selection than the cry of a baby. Or a toddler. Or a big boy who should know better and should really start acting his age. Because "Oh my god there is a [large hungry predator] out there who is going to eat us if you don't be quiet" doesn't work.

And yes, I have tried.

2013-04-29 16:46:08 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Sharing data, research or presentations? Get a DOI for it!

+Christian Kummer offers some reasons why using FigShare for sharing your data is a good idea.

https://ckummer.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/data-citation-figshare-doi/

2013-04-28 14:41:42 (15 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

5 Steps to Separate Science from Hype, No PhD Required

1. Separate the sales pitch from the science
2. Find the data
3. Evaluate the data
4. Put the story into context
5. Ask an expert

2013-04-26 15:45:26 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Detail

Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope'.

http://xkcd.com/1204/

2013-04-26 14:10:03 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Prenatal exposure to anti-epilepsy drug increases risk of autism

Valproate was the only anti-epilepsy drug shown to have this effect.  The numbers are low but the relative risk is quite high in this study.

2013-04-26 14:00:19 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Vaccine developed to treat autism-associated symptoms

A small sprinkle of irony to go with your morning coffee.

2013-04-22 22:58:54 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

What's the deal with all the community invitations in the past few days?  Is it just me or did the floodgates open (again) on these?  They all seem rather arbitrary and obscure too.  Perhaps Google could give us the option to decline the invitation direction from the notification page.

2013-04-22 18:16:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Sometimes you have to spend money to make money

Keeping people addicted to a dangerous product is a lot of hard work.  Everyone seems to be against you and they always are trying to think up new ways to make it harder for you to get people addicted.  You have to constantly come up with clever new business tactics, like, I don't know, say a tumour that has to keep growing and changing.

Take tobacco for example.  Undoubtably dangerous, yet still sold everywhere.  Governments and health professionals and scientists and other do-gooders are constantly trying to discourage people from smoking.  One of the tactics is to impose tobacco taxes.  So, how does the industry counter this and keep the nicotine flowing?  They lower their prices on the cheap cigarettes to match the tax increases.  Get everyone addicted on the cheap stuff and then move them up to the primo productwith th... more »

2013-04-22 17:16:50 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

49th Parallel Coffee - Local Vancouver roaster

Coffee is an important part of every day, but it's particularly important on Mondays.  Like most of Canada, Vancouver coffee is dominated by Tim Horton's and Starbucks.  But there are a myriad of small coffee shops and even a few local roasters.  One of these is 49th Parallel.  They have a couple of cafes where you can get an espresso and a swanky donut, but they also sell their roasted beans to various BC restaurants and to the public at a few grocery stores.  A big plus with their beans is that the roasted date is stamped right on the bottom of the bag, and it's usually only  a week or two old. (JJ Bean does this too.)  Most other brands have no date or a "best-before" date that is a year in the future.  Ick. 

If you've got a machine and grinder at home I would highly recommend ditching theStarbuck... more »

2013-04-19 18:45:55 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Vancouver Housing Price Drop

It seems clear that Vancouver's housing market is now swirling the bowl, with some areas down 10% from the peak a year ago. This is an interesting graph comparing the drop from peak prices (April 2012) to some of the big cities in the US.  [Graph source and more discussion here: https://vancouverpricedrop.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/drop-from-peak-chart-march-2013/]

Vancouver is the light green line that's just about 10 months along, and it appears to be tracking Seattle pretty well.  It will be interesting to see how long the spring bump lasts.  I'd guess not long but we'll have to wait and see.

I'm posting this in the BC forum but everyone else in Canada might find it interesting, if only for the schadenfreude of seeing Vancouver's real estate arrogance dry up just a bit.

2013-04-19 18:42:52 (70 comments, 174 reshares, 295 +1s)

Duck being chased by cat in shark costume riding a Roomba.

Who else feels like the duck this week?

2013-04-17 04:23:44 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Haiku found in the NY Times

This is just brilliant.

-----

A little of this goes
a long way, and a lot
goes nowhere at all.

-----

It made me wonder
if snow leopards have a taste
for joggers as well.

-----

2013-04-16 20:03:21 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Points of View returns to Nature Methods

The fantastic Points of View column in Nature Methods was put on hiatus late last year by its author Bang Wong.  Now it has been revived, with the great +Martin Krzywinski as the new author.  Among many, many other things Martin is the creator of Circos, the software that makes your data round and beautiful.  If you ever have the chance to meet Martin, preferably over a sushi lunch, I highly recommend it.

Q: You photographed Alex (2000-2002) and helped her become the poster rat for genome sequencing. For example, she was Genome Research’s rat cover-girl. She frequently rode on your shoulder and seems like a groovy friend.

M.K.: Don’t be fooled by Alex’s visual presentation. She bit me countless times. But what do you expect from a rat? Maybe it is I that never learned.

Q: In addition to photo-shoots withAlex, you ... more »

2013-04-12 18:20:06 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Here's a nice 1-figure summary of the complexity that is RNAseq.  

via +Josh Witten at The Finch and Pea (thefinchandpea.com) 

2013-04-12 17:30:52 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Gene patents save lives.  Or something like that...

Without the patents, our work would not have been possible. We would not have been able to raise the funds necessary to decode the genes, design and deliver the tests, interpret the results, and help patients.

Exactly.  Which is precisely why testing for the cystic fibrosis gene CFTR is only available in, let's see...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/GeneTests/lab/clinical_disease_id/2220?db=genetests

...133 different labs.  Umm.... Oh...

2013-04-11 19:45:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Review of Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

This is a great review written by Seamus O’Mahony "a physician with an interest in medicine and literature".  He has an interesting perspective on Hitch's illness.

2013-04-10 19:27:31 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Bird flu, 2013

The always great +Tara C. Smith gives a great overview of the recent influenza-of-concern and explains why it won't be the last.

2013-04-10 05:16:06 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Great profile of the hilarious and clever +Tabatha Southey

Southey is a study in opposites: a shopper at Holt Renfrew who bikes there, a high school dropout with a national column, humourous while making a serious point, a regular joe outside the journalism world, and a celebrity inside it. On Twitter, she banters with other journalists (frequently outwitting them), and come Saturday morning, big names retweet her column—their equivalent of a thumbs-up. Yet, she still has the same voice and outlook she did 10 years ago, and writes about omnibus bills the same way she wrote about getting drunk with men.

2013-04-09 04:00:05 (3 comments, 6 reshares, 6 +1s)

It's All Good: a Panorama of Pseudoscience Premises

Well, that's not the exact title of the cookbook. But Science-ish makes a good case for why it should be.

the enduring question that Paltrow’s book raises is why we continually buy into the junk advice of celebrity health promoters who have no specialization in health and everything to gain from us believing their claims.

2013-04-08 16:34:02 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The recent issues around the #HeLa genome publication generated a lot of interest in genomic data, privacy, sharing, and access to the sequence data of individuals. The research rubber is hitting the road now, and will only continue to speed up.

The +Genetic Alliance is hosting a webinar series about this topic. The next one is tomorrow, and you can find out more details about it (and some of my thoughts on the privacy issues) here.

2013-04-06 19:23:53 (5 comments, 10 reshares, 10 +1s)

Do you want to hear bad news about your own genetics?  You might not get to choose

When the authors of a report include "Highly Anticipated" in the title you know that either: 1) it is highly anticipated, or 2) they're trying to get some attention.  In the case of the recent ACMG guidelines ACMG Recommendations for Reporting of Incidental Findings in Clinical Exome and Genome Sequencing Report (www.acmg.net) it's both.  And what do these recommendations say?  For one thing, they say that if you get a sequencing test you can't choose to not hear about anything bad that is discovered.

As most people are aware, recent advances in genome sequencing technologies have made it possible to sequence most or all of a patient's genome for clinical diagnostic and predictive testing.  Here's a couple of open-access reviews to get you up to speed on thedeta... more »

2013-04-05 04:18:02 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Molecular Scissors: Restriction Enzymes

✄ Microbial Underworld: Imagine a cut throat, competitive underworld where intruders are efficiently decimated by a custom-made weapon that slashes right through their life lines. These ancient molecular scissors evolved in bacteria to defend against parasitic viruses, called 'phages. Better known as restriction endonucleases, these enzymes recognize a specific DNA sequence as their target. A short 6-8 letter sequence effectively marks the hapless victim for destruction. How does the host go unscathed? The same sequence is protected by a chemical modification (methylation) that makes it invisible to a veritable incarnation of Edward Scissorhands.

✄ Snip, Snip! The molecular scissors are named after the bacteria of origin. For example, Eco RI signifies that it was from the E. coli bacterium. Several thousand have beendis... more »

2013-04-04 04:24:06 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN... On Music

Why does music move you? How does music affect our brains? Can musical training make you smarter?  When is music like a drug? How would you teach a robot to recognize and play music? and, How can I get this earworm out of my head??

Now is your chance to have these and any other questions you have about music and the mind answered.

Join world renowned Music and Mind experts Laurel Trainor (McMaster U, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour), Virginia Penhune (Concordia U, Psychology),   David Gerry (McMaster U, School of the Arts), and +Douglas Eck (Google) for another Hangout Scientifique panel discussion moderated by +ScienceSunday co-curator +Allison Sekuler and special #MusicalScienceSunday  guest co-curator +Charlie Hoover .

This  #SciSunHOA  also will feature singing sensation +MontyHarper, ... more »

2013-04-03 04:35:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing:

Michael Eisen covering all the bases

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346#.UVm-rwyMgVo.twitter

2013-04-03 04:06:15 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Interfering with RNA

A birthday tribute to someone I really admire here on G+, who is an amazing mentor and friend. Happy Birthday +Rajini Rao, hope you have a wonderful year ahead and it's been a pleasure knowing and working with you on our many projects together on G+!

A few days ago during our ENCODE Hangout on Air (http://goo.gl/H6KDE), I mentioned microRNAs. I wanted to write a post today about the general mechanism of how a gene can be 'silenced' through a process known as RNA interference.

• As we explained during the Hangout, the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology is DNA --> RNA --> Protein. This means the DNA blueprint makes a sequence-specific copy of RNA, which in turn acts as a blueprint for a specific sequence of amino acids which make up a protein. 

• So imagine if you could somehow destroy the RNAblue... more »